About Cottage Garden Blog
Cottage Garden Blog was started with one simple aim: to make traditional English cottage gardening feel approachable, not intimidating. Whether you've just moved into your first home with a bare patch of soil, or you're several seasons into building your own billowing borders, we want this to be the place you come back to for honest, practical advice.
We believe the best cottage gardens aren't the most perfectly manicured — they're the ones planted with a bit of confidence, a willingness to let things self-seed where they please, and an eye for the plants that have earned their place in British gardens for generations. Roses tumbling over an arch, foxgloves nodding at the back of a border, a gravel path softened by nepeta spilling over its edges.
Every guide on this site is written to be genuinely useful: clear steps, realistic timeframes, and an honest sense of what to expect, season by season. We garden in the UK climate ourselves, so the advice here is grounded in what actually works through a British spring, a British summer, and — let's be honest — a lot of British rain.
Meet the team
Eleanor Hartley
Founder & Head Gardener
Eleanor has tended cottage gardens across Somerset for over fifteen years and founded Cottage Garden Blog to share practical, unfussy advice for growing beautifully in the British climate.
Tom Whitfield
Wildlife Gardening Writer
Tom writes about wildlife-friendly gardening and pollinator-led planting, drawing on his background in horticulture and countryside conservation.
